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Most people have no idea what the word hacker means
- iterationx 15y agoIf your favorite word has been co-opted, then make up a new word.
- bproper 15y agopeople tried cracker vs hacker, but it never caught on. Then techies reclaimed hacker as a positive, even if the media doesn't uses it another way. Now there is hacker, the compliment among engineers, and hacker, the computer criminal in the press.
- utefan001 15y agoI have thought a lot about this and think "computer ninja" is our best option.
- cema 15y agoOh no not that please. It sounds so cheesy and cartoonish.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoWell at least the bad guys can be 'computer pirates' and we can debate which is better pirates or ninjas. And if we somehow managed to get the pirate vs ninja meme into public debate then that would be a very clever hack indeed.
- cema 15y agoThieves versus robbers, sounds like.
- iterationx 15y agosounds about as bad as "code smell"
- cema 15y agoWell, that at least can be considered a term...
- peterwwillis 15y agoYep; the duality of words and their users. There's no way to "take back" a word if popular use dictates it's something else. It started as one thing, it ends as something very different. (ex. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fag http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fag http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinhead http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinhead) I know many people who have campaigned to try to make the word into a positive, to "take it back", but the majority of people don't care what we do or why. The media shapes the conversation and the people have it without us.
- simonsarris 15y agoMost people have a different primary definition of the word "hacker" than the author, in other words. Most people know exactly what the word "hacker" means within their respective social circles. It seems almost bizarrely religious to me for someone to say something to the effect of, "the way most people use a word is not the same as my own way or its origin, therefore most people ought to change."
- wccrawford 15y ago"But typing the default password “1111” into the voicemail box of a murdered girl is not hacking." Actually, technically, it is. It just so happened that it was really, really easy.
- bproper 15y agoI would argue that since no technical or creative skill was required for this, it fails the Model Railroad Club test.
- wccrawford 15y agoAlright, I give up. The only Google result for "fails the Model Railroad Club test" is this post. What is it? :)
- nbpoole 15y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_Model_Railroad_Club http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_Model_Railroad_Club "The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and one of the most celebrated model railroad clubs in the world, because of its historic role as a wellspring of hacker culture."
- sequoia 15y agoIronically the same Kevin Mitnick who declared using default passwords "not hacking" gave a talk at HOPE http://thenexthope.org/ http://thenexthope.org/ about his adventures avoiding law enforcement in which social engineering played a central role. Is lying to someone on the phone to get a password "hacking?" Maybe, maybe not, but he would have been unable to complete his goals without those crucial soft skills. Perhaps password guessing and SQLi is "script kiddie stuff" but it makes me think of a "skilled thief" who scales a building and deftly opens a locked window 3 stories up, while a less experienced accomplice tries the back door and finds it unlocked. It's silly to condemn someone for using a simple method if that method is effective. EDIT: Kevin Mitnick is cool guy, I don't mean to criticize him.
- cydonian_monk 15y agoI'm a Hacker and an Engineer. I'll be damned if I stop using either title just because they were sullied by criminals, confused by the press, or misunderstood by the public. [Late Edit] I was rather suprised by the implication that the term hacker came from the M.I.T. model rail club. As a model railroader I've never heard the term used in the community. Bash (ie: kitbash) is way more popular.
- Symmetry 15y agoThey also originated a bunch of other words, like using foo as a metasyntactic variable. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TMRC.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TMRC.html
- cydonian_monk 15y agoInteresting. Thanks. I really should read Levy's book one of these days... I've only got three copies of it.
- erikpukinskis 15y agoYou are a model railroader and software engineer who vehemently defends his identity as a hacker, and you own three unread copies of Hackers? s/will wish I had done it years ago when I/should/
- cydonian_monk 15y agoValid point. Considering two of those three copies are electronic, I have increasingly few excuses.... Going to move it up in the rotation.
- a3_nm 15y agoI occasionally wear a T-shirt indicating "I'm a hacker". It has generated a surprising number of comments from strangers in public places.
- genieyclo 15y agoWhat kinds of comments?
- bhousel 15y ago"Can you help me fix my phone?"
- a3_nm 15y agoThey're usually surprised. Some were faintly rude, others were nicer. My canned reply is that they should understand "hacker" in the MIT sense, and that it's not necessarily related to computer security or even computers in general. They usually lose interest at this point. The most articulate chat that I had was with someone who asked me if I was into social engineering, and explained that he had read _The Art of Deception_ and found it quite inspiring.
- jfruh 15y agoSince we're talking about language use, this quote from Kevin Mitnik: "What News Corp. did, guess pin codes, spoofing voicemails, that is amateur script kiddie stuff." Is itself kind of interesting, as there's no use of computer scripting languages at all here. He's using "script kiddie" to mean not "someone who uses pre-written scripts to break into computer systems and then boasts of their skills" but rather "someone whose skills I don't respect."
- WalterBright 15y agoHackers have been complaining about that since at least the mid-seventies. Yes, I was there.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sequoia 15y agoI find this debate/discussion ("who's really a hacker??") boring and pointless; it's a mainstay of 2600 editor "Emmanuel Goldstein" on the 2600 radio show ( http://www.2600.com/offthehook/ http://www.2600.com/offthehook/ ). His view is that once you're a malicious criminal (or do something he doesn't like, e.g. Anonymous ddos's) you're not a hacker. "I don't like what you're doing! You're not a real hacker! You give hackers a bad name!" Now to make myself a hypocrite: One aspect of this phenomenon that I find amusing is how low the bar is set in terms of programming to qualify as a "hacker." e.g. "I hacked together this RoR site over the weekend" makes me think, "You used a popular, well documented website building framework for it's intended purpose... how exactly is this hacking?" "I hacked together a cake this weekend; even hacked my own cream cheese frosting!" People (like myself) who would once have had to settle for a more boring title like "software engineer" or "computer scientists" are all "hackers" now. :p /my 2¢
- zck 15y ago>"I hacked together this RoR site over the weekend" makes me think, "You used a popular, well documented website building framework for it's intended purpose... how exactly is this hacking?" It's a third sense of the word, meaning something like "put together without a plan, by trying things until they worked". When someone says "I hacked together this program", they mean "I threw code at it, and now it seems to do what I want".
- archgoon 15y agoRelated: "This is a bit of hack" to describe a solution that is very fragile and subject to breaking, or just ignores good practices. Technically, you could argue that this is in fact the original usage, as the solution's fragility typically is due to ignoring the conventional semantics and exploiting the actual underlying implementation of something.
- sequoia 15y agogood definition! You are right. To expand upon it: "not fully tested / MVP / not yet able to handle all possible cases"
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- andrewcross 15y agoMy acid test for finding out the mainstream definition of a word is to ask my parents (50-ish but relatively tech-savvy). In this case hacker means someone who tries to steal your shit by breaking into their computer with viruses.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoSo here is a sad prediction, we'll get to the point where we start calling it 'the h word' and technical people will call each other hackers and laugh but if some non-technical type calls someone a hacker, well that will be completely unacceptable. And while you think "OMG did he just compare calling someone a hacker to the scourge of racism that we have yet to purge ourselves from?" Yes, I did. You see at some point I suspect it will become, from a non-technical person, a vicious form of character smear to insinuate that a technical person uses their skills to steal from society. And these 'technists' if you will, will arise from a population that is afraid because they depend heavily on technology in their day to day lives and yet they don't understand it, and they are at the mercy of people who do understand it, and that makes them angry because for some, they will feel inferior. And folks who are angry and afraid lash out in vicious and brutal ways to try to salve that fear and anger. I've tried for years to split the meaning by using 'cracker' vs 'hacker' or simply 'criminal' but to no avail.
- grinich 15y agoIn personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds
- Ideka 15y agoThat's just wrong :(.
- DanielStraight 15y agoIf your goal in speaking is to communicate something to the listener, then it's helpful to use terms in ways that will make sense to the listener. How is that wrong?
- kragen 15y agoHe's helping himself by disassociating himself from the community that supports him. That's a prisoner's-dilemma defection: if everyone is afraid to acknowledge being a hacker when they're talking to journalists, journalists will only ever learn the criminal definition.
- Ideka 15y agoIt's exactly as kragen says. I think he should call himself hacker, and explain why. Altough, of course, it can be a pain having to explain it every time, so it's understandable.
- mindcrime 15y agoI find this to be a silly discussion. Word have multiple meanings, words are confusing and ambiguous, people are confused and ambiguous. But somehow we muddle through, despite different people assigning different meanings to "hacker." I really just don't care about this. Then again, I consider the meaning of "hacker" to include both the "amateur script kiddie" types AND people like Peter Norvig, Gerald Sussman, and Rob Pike. It's just a matter of degree and of focus, with context to provide illumination.
- sp332 15y agoThat's because it's slang. How do you define a "jerk", "mensch", "momma's boy", or "hoopy frood"?
- zb 15y agoUnless the title of the article has changed, there's some editorialising going on in the headline here of a type that is usually frowned upon on HN. And the result is, in a sense, completely absurd. Most people have no idea what the word hacker means to us.
- asreal 15y agoGlad that was cleared up. All this time, I thought a 'hacker' was a navel gazing, media junky who happens to know a bit of ruby on rails and javascript!
- vorg 15y ago"A hack" = a quick and dirty fix to some code to make it do something extra as required by some non-technical manager "Hacking" = trying out different random changes to a codebase until you stumble on the one that does what you want Those are the definitions (from 1980's Australia/NZ) that stick in my brain, despite being exposed to the "new", more positive, definition from Hacker News.
- ig1 15y agoThe term "hacker" has multiple meaning, and the use of hacking to manipulate a phone system is not only valid but was also the original use of the term when it originate at MIT in the 1960s. http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/ http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/
- anateus 15y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman
- philcrissman 15y agoMaybe this is nitpicking, but did the author this article do zero fact-checking? >Mr. Mitnick, who ... is publishing his first book in August... Er... Following the link to his "first book" leads to Mr. Mitnick's website, whose products page lists his... other books... Not to mention the well-known tech writer Stevy Levy. :-)
- Rhapso 15y agoThe best way to define hacking in the positive engineering sense I have ever heard is: "To make furniture with an ax" To take tools at hand, oft not ideal for the goal, use them to make the more ideal tools if time allows, then to make something beautiful entirely due to the skill, talent, and/or creativity of the wielder.
- kaffiene 15y agoThe word 'hacker' has changed and been used many different ways over the years. I have one thing to say to other hackers who don't like the way non-hackers use the term 'hacker': "harden the fuck up and stop being so precious. It is not your word. The English language belongs to all of us and evolves whether you approve of its direction or not." Someone more concise than me said "English is a juggernaut truck - it goes on regardless"
- cafard 15y agoMost pedants have hobby horses.